Fast Mode Thinking characteristics
- Happens very quickly;
- Unconscious and automatic - we have no control – for instance 2x2=4 (automatic) but 27x367 – that is not automatic, that happens in the slow mode;
- Error prone – can be misleading and jumps to conclusions based on little evidence;
- Heavily dependent on biases, values, status quo, social norms, feelings, emotions;
- Intuitive and looks for patterns – based on our experiences and memory – it produces a story with little effort;
- Causality – does not deal with statistics – it deals with individuals and story lines;
- Insensitive to the quality and quantity of evidence in which it generates judgement;
- Reliant on heuristics - mental shortcuts for making quick presumptions and fast conclusions;
- Impulsive, impatient, dynamic;
- Has low energy requirements;
- It is triggered by associative memory – remembering the association of two unrelated things, e.g. a colour or object might trigger the smell of a perfume;
- Memory and expertise – we remember things in context (chunking), we do not remember isolated facts;
- Nonlinear rapid and parallel process – creative thought and imagination;
- Impulsive and impatient – responding to gut feelings;
- Overconfident - prone to blind spots, responsible for the illusion of skill and prone to make poor forecasts;
- Not self-objective;
- Context dependent – it looks for clues for triggers and relationships, but does not know how to separate ‘noise’ (see figure) from important factors in the context;
- Lives in the present moment;
- Poor at dealing with details.
